The theaters had just been closed, and the streets resounded with the humming of motors, the drumming of hoofs and the rattle of wheels.
They also were flooded with what seemed to her garish light, for she had swept through many a wooden town lying wrapped in darkness beside its railroad track.

The hansoms and motors came up in battalions, and in most of them she could see men of leisure in conventional white and black and lavishly dressed women, while the sidewalks streamed with a further host of pleasure-seekers.

She wondered when these people slept, or when they worked, if indeed in one sense some of them worked at all.

Even in the winter they had nothing like this in Montreal, and the contrast between it and the strenuous, grimly practical activity of the Canadian railroad camp or the lonely western ranch was more striking still.

There men rose to toil with the dawn, and slept when the soft dusk crept up across solemn pines or silent prairie.